Is the Western elite’s brainchild – the European Union – disintegrating? Due to persistent economic problems, the rise of “popular resentment” across the continent, the political fallout after the illegal coup in Ukraine and the subsequent unpopular economic war on Russia, the EU is on the verge of crumbling.

In an interview with France 24, the hedge fund manager, billionaire and founder of the Open Society Foundation, George Soros, reveals that the European Union has failed to achieve the desires of the elite and many within Europe now see “Russia as a role model”:

“We have to recognise that the [European] Union itself, which is a noble, well-intended experiment in international governance, has failed, and has not delivered what it promised, and there is such a degree of disappointment that even Russia can offer an alternative.” (3.21 into the interview)

Soros then asserts that many in Europe – including the UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage, Front National President Marine Le Pen in France, as well as “a lot of people in Germany” – find the idea of “closer cooperation with Russia rather attractive”.

Europe has been in crisis for years now and the outcome of this latest flare up with Russia could determine the future of the EU itself. In an article featured in The New York Review this month titled: Wake Up, Europe, Soros notes that since the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent austerity policies imposed by the nefarious troika, “popular resentment” and support for anti-European parties has risen:

“The European Union in general and the eurozone in particular lost their way after the financial crisis of 2008.The fiscal rules that currently prevail in Europe have aroused a lot of popular resentment. Anti-Europe parties captured nearly 30 percent of the seats in the latest elections for the European Parliament but they had no realistic alternative to the EU to point to until recently. Now Russia is presenting an alternative that poses a fundamental challenge to the values and principles on which the European Union was originally founded…. It is also high time for the European Union to take a critical look at itself… The bureaucracy of the EU no longer has a monopoly of power and it has little to be proud of.”

The elite have become increasingly fearful of popular uprisings across the West which they . . .